4 BILLION packets sent in 2 days ...What?

Holy cow!! DSL status window shows 4.3 Billion (not Million) packets were sent in just over 2 days, while only 28k packets were received.

McAfee antivirus + firewall, Ad-Aware, Spybot, Windefender all up to date and recently scanned. Linksys router looks all secure. No problems with 3 other PC's.

How can this be possible? What should I look at? Suggestions, please?

 

My first thought is that you should get a network monitoring app to see what is transmitting so much data. Something like Wireshark might help http://www.wireshark.org/

What may be happening is a legitimate app may be trying to poll for updates or to connect to the net for another reason, but because the server is down or your firewall is blocking the response, its not getting its required contact, so it retries. Hence a massive sending list.

A network monitor should tell you what app is initiating the packets, which in turn should point you to the culprit. What you don't want is for you to have a trojan or virus that is sending out keypresses or acting as a zombie server or anything else sinister. These could be sending out data without actually requiring a response and may have corrupted your Anti-malware programs to seem as though they are working correctly when they are actually being by-passed.

 

Thanks, g_bomb! I downloaded Wireshark, and I'm trying to learn how to use it.

Fortunately, YouTube has some good tutorials. Unfortunately, some of them scared the pants off me!!

In the meantime, I did fresh installations on my anti-malware. Ran all last night and they turned up nothing ... not even a nasty root kit. I think that's good news.